Contact centers, such as Automatic Call Distribution or ACD systems, are employed by many enterprises to service customer contacts. A typical contact center includes a switch and/or server to receive and route incoming packet-switched and/or circuit-switched contacts and one or more resources, such as human agents and automated resources (e.g., Interactive Voice Response (IVR) units), to service the incoming contacts. These resources may be provisioned, or retained, by the contact center to handle a predetermined demand associated with the contact center.
As products and problems become more complex and diverse in nature, and as contact center activity varies with time, it becomes more difficult to provision, or retain, resources based on a predetermined, or expected, demand. Provisioning more resources than are required to handle the expected demand can result in an economic burden on a company. On the other hand, provisioning fewer resources than are required to handle the expected demand can result in customer dissatisfaction.
It is one goal of a contact center to maintain good customer service when handling contacts, and as such, work items representing the contacts are typically assigned to qualified agents in a timely and efficient manner. In some cases, however, work items cannot be assigned to resources in such a manner. For example, a contact center may not have the qualified resources to handle a particular work item. As another example, all of the qualified resources of a contact center may be busy or unavailable. In any event, suboptimal assignments or long wait times may result and contact center performance as well as long-term customer service may suffer.